VANCOUVER — Chelsea McMullan was just looking for the right song to score a movie, but what she found shattered her world into a million pieces of brittle stereotype: Rae Spoon.

A transgender singer-songwriter from the Prairies, Spoon abandoned the traditional gender boxes two years ago and opted out the “he” or “she” equation entirely. Spoon prefers the pronoun “they.”

Over the course of their decade-deep career that includes a Polaris Music Prize nomination in 2009 and a published book of short stories, they also preferred to keep pretty quiet about the truly personal part of their past.

But McMullan was transfixed by the person in the thick-rimmed glasses and a Weezer-head brush cut. She found their music haunting, and once she sat down for coffee to exchange information and negotiate the rights to certain musical tracks, McMullan was certain she had to make a documentary about the gender-defying presence in her midst.

“While we were collaborating on Deadman — my previous film about a guy up here in the Interior who was building a western amusement theme park next to a reserve — Rae started talking to me about their life. And it was just so crazy,” says McMullan, a Vancouver-raised filmmaker now located in Toronto.

“I knew I had to make a documentary.”

Six years later, McMullan is touring the festival circuit with her first feature film, My Prairie Home, produced through the National Film Board and with the help of mentors Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier (Manufactured Landscapes, Watermark).

With such an unorthodox subject, McMullan says she had to find a new way of telling the story. She knew she had to break down the walls of narrative and blend different forms, much the same way Rae Spoon breaks down walls of gender.

“I had never seen anything that combined documentary and musical numbers,” says McMullan, who eventually settled on a hybrid of two completely antithetical genres.

Typically, documentary goes out of its way to avoid staged, contrived, entirely unreal moments — which is the very lifeblood of the standard Hollywood tuner. Yet, feeling empowered and somewhat untethered on her pioneering journey to the gender frontier, McMullan decided to let go of all expectation and let the story shape itself.

“Rae’s story is sort of a really powerful journey of reclamation and survival,” says McMullan, 29.

“They climbed out of a very dark situation and, through pure grit, survived. I think it’s debatable where they are in their career, and if they weren’t trans if they would be more successful, but when we started, almost nothing was known about Rae. They may as well have come from a stork.”

The truth is Spoon grew up in the saddle of dysfunction with a slew of siblings struggling to deal with a mentally unstable, and fundamentally religious, patriarch. While such family histories are common for people experiencing gender dysphoria, McMullan doesn’t explore the medical or psychological reasons behind Spoon’s presentation.

She gives her subject the entire frame to call their own, because for Spoon, finding a canvas broad enough to capture the ambiguities as well as the particulars was always a challenge. People prefer to cordon things off where they can be governed by the tacit laws of enclosure, but Spoon pushes all the fences by abandoning the pen of gender.

“Rae had asked us to keep the family stuff till the end,” McMullan says. “But the first couple of interviews I did with Rae were total disasters. Rae would shut down as soon as they started talking. We had to find different ways of communicating and so I asked Rae to start writing,” she says.

If Spoon could write the feelings on a piece of paper, then show them to McMullan, the two could then explore ways of talking about the content before going to camera.

“It was an interesting trajectory for me as a documentarian because I had to start thinking out of the box about how Rae and I were going to get to a place where they would talk about a lot of this stuff, because they wanted to talk about it,” she says.

“But they almost couldn’t. It was too much. They had to break it down into chunks, and they would write, and we would talk, and then go to camera. This went on for years.”

For six years, McMullan says she felt like a silent stalker — a deer hunter in a blind — waiting to get her subject in the crosshairs and pull the narrative trigger. It was an unsettling feeling, she says, because she felt like the whole world was stalking Spoon.

“I think being out and trans on the Prairies makes you a bit of a target,” McMullan says. “Rae is hunted in so many ways. I felt like I was hunting them the whole time. We would joke about how Rae is like a deer, constantly aware of the surroundings, because they have to be. It’s a matter of survival. And so this deer is constantly weaving and dodging and not letting their guard down,” McMullan says.

“That was irritating at first but I realized that’s who Rae is. Someone who presents like Rae is in a dangerous situation a lot of the time.”

In big cities, being transgender isn’t such a big deal anymore. But small-town Canada can still think small, and small thoughts lead to hate, and often violence.

Yet, as the opening musical number of McMullan’s film proves, a little tolerance can go a long way. We watch Spoon serenade a diner full of truckers in Alberta, and for the most part, people smile and nod quite sweetly.

“But I can’t think of anything more polarizing than gender,” McMullan says. “I can’t even count the number of times I’ve had eyes rolled at me when I’ve spoken about my politics about gender.

“Abandoning the binary is emancipating. I’ve transformed. I wear my boyfriend’s clothes a lot more than I did before. I try to get him to wear mine, because I like sharing clothes, but we’re still working on that,” McMullan says.

“I really strongly believe that in 20 years, the way we perceive gender will be different than we do now. Gender is the last frontier and Rae is out there, on the Prairie … a real pioneer.”

Capsule review

My Prairie Home: Given the two genres have completely opposite ends, it’s no small miracle that Chelsea McMullan’s musical-documentary about singer-songwriter Rae Spoon works at all. Yet documentary’s need for truth finds an easy companion in the typically hyperbolic world of large production numbers because McMullan doesn’t ever go big. She winnows everything down to the personal, the small and the unique while setting it against the wide-open skies of the PSrairie landscape, ensuring every detail feels slightly surreal. It’s a satisfying entry into the world of Spoon, a transgendered performer with a truckload of family and religious baggage that finds aching expression through song. Even those without a direct connection to the star or the situation will find something lovable in the movie because at a very fundamental level, this movie loves people — and you feel it.

My Prairie Home screens Tuesday, Oct. 1, 4 p.m., RIO.

- Katherine Monk

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Share

VIFF: Vancouver director’s docu-musical breaks barriers

Video

Best of Postmedia

Millennials, amirite? They’re nothing but Instagram-happy, emoji-LOL-ing, mannequin-challenging navelgazers. Or so the theory goes. How can they put their pants on one leg at a time, like everyone else, when they’re sausaged into skinny jeans? Yet when it comes to […]

“And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, ‘Come and see.’ And I saw, and behold a white elephant, and he that sat upon him had a crown, which he wore atop his fiery hair, and […]

An Ottawa judge has thrown out a romance fraud case that has taken more than four years to go to trial, ruling that the excessive delay has robbed the accused man of his right to a fair trial. Ontario Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips on Friday stayed the case against Kevin Bishop of Ottawa, who had […]

Almost Done!

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.